I was Flynn's Swab for his year. Did you know that he went on to become a Judge in the US ?

Are you in that photo or not ?

No, I'm not in that particular photo John which I think is from 1962/3 maybe. Flynn had a habit of losing his rag and shouting "God damn you to hell!" at people - maybe at you! I can't imagine him as a judge. Did you keep in touch?

Hah! If you think you have a problem with people not wanting to pay taxes, come to New England and see just how bad it can be. Inthe 21st century, in what is still the richest country in the world, we get our water from a well and our sewage goes into a septic tank because voters wil not pay for municipal services.

If a stone falls on an egg: alas for the egg
If an egg falls on a stone: alas for the egg

LongGone wrote:Hah! If you think you have a problem with people not wanting to pay taxes, come to New England and see just how bad it can be. Inthe 21st century, in what is still the richest country in the world, we get our water from a well and our sewage goes into a septic tank because voters wil not pay for municipal services.

Yes, and it may just be a coincidence that Britain and America are the two prime movers of Chicago school economics. What was it Reagan said? Something about government being a dirty word. This is all a long way from FDR's ideas in the 1930s, isn't it, that government was there to solve things.

I was Flynn's Swab for his year. Did you know that he went on to become a Judge in the US ?

Are you in that photo or not ?

No, I'm not in that particular photo John which I think is from 1962/3 maybe. Flynn had a habit of losing his rag and shouting "God damn you to hell!" at people - maybe at you! I can't imagine him as a judge. Did you keep in touch?

rockfreak wrote:I'd appreciate a few more posts on this matter from other people. Are Michael Scuffil and Sejintenej (aka Banker Brown) alone in their belief that children, or at least adolescents, in this country are all a bunch of irredeemable yobs and hooligans?

I can't talk for MS but you are wrong. In France kids of five are actively taught good behaviour in school and heaven help them if they fail to show respect and good manners outside school. Things are a bit different here where promotion is too often based on hours in the job and not ability. We had a case here where kids at the school gates played chicken with the traffic. Even when one got killed the headmaster refused to warn them because "it's not my job".

rockfreak wrote: Considering that neither of them appears resident here,

again, in respect of me (?grammar) you are wrong.

rockfreak wrote:they seem to have a pretty generalised view of things. My three girls went to the local comprehensive. Indeed the middle one went to Grammar for a year and was holding her own academically but found the other middle-class girls a bit stand-offish (parents Telegraph readers rather than Guardian readers, perhaps). So we took her out and sent her to the local comprie with her old mates from the locality and she flourished. She's now studying to be a teacher.

My three children have, between them, a PhD (and was a guest lecturer in the US before he even got that), an MA and a BSc. One granddaughter is at university studying a medical speciality, another danced with a major ballet company when she was fourteen and at seventeen is a ballet teacher (and is still at school!). The other two are too young (like two years of age) to be expected to shine so brightly but they were /are/will be all state school educated.

rockfreak wrote:The youngest was creative and ended up getting a degree at uni. The eldest was a ladette before the term was invented (she wouldn't have lasted a week at CH), she achieved nothing at school but worked out her own niche after she left. For a while she did care work with old people, often suffering from dementia, and then with severely mentally and disabled adults, and turned out to have a natural talent for it. On the minimum wage all the time, she took a pride in getting to know her residents and trying to give them the best day possible. I was proud of her. But I suppose in the limited worldview of Messrs Scuffil and Brown she wouldn't have MADE IT..

David; I don't remember you but my guess is that you had a home, a family and perhaps siblings. You try leaving CH with the civvies on your back, a fiver (in 1961 money) and a pasport but without the rest. To me it is simply the overcoming of obstacles and in the UK now things are spoonfed.

rockfreak wrote: I get a bit fed up with pointing out to thick-headed Old Blues that if we have an underclass in this country it's because the snotty rich (including snotty Old Blues from our beloved supposed CHARITY SCHOOL) baulk at paying more taxes for education and social support services. In Denmark the top rate of tax is 55%, ten points more than here, but I don't see a stream of Danish businessmen hi-tailing it to the UK. I guess in the end there's an old adage that predates Mrs Thatcher and her fancy ideas, and that is that you get what you pay for.

and to think that my ancestors left Denmark for somewhere where they could settle in relative comfort - France!"I guess in the end there's an old adage that predates Mrs Thatcher and her fancy ideas, and that is that you get what you pay for"; I would change the penultimate word to strive but we got rubbish, not because we didn't pay enough but because we allowed mediocracy to thrive

Leaving any school in the 1960s was the easy bit. Anyone could get a job of some sort and get on if they worked hard. I came from a working class north London background, had family in the north and Scotland, and I didn't know anyone who was unemployed back then. There were training schemes, apprenticeships, night classes on every street corner. Even if you couldn't get a brilliant job you could still make out. That was because the essentials were there - reasonable job security, affordable housing and affordable and reliable public transport in the outlying areas. All that has come under attack since Thatcher, and youngsters today, far from being spoonfed, will have a much harder time than we did. The ONS figures are that in the decades since 1980, unemployment averaged out has tripled from the decades before, and that the inequality index has gone off the radar. Job insecurity is rampant. No-one in our era would have been told to work as an unpaid intern. Any government, Tory or Labour, suggesting it would have lost the next election. By the way, I'd prefer that you don't send me private messages. If you've got something to say please put it on the public site.

Unemployment might have increased considerably but if that is the case how come Antipodeans arrive in the UK and have jobs withing 24 hours? Many Eastern Europeans also get jobs (even if they have to stand by the roadside as happens in other countries) and it is simply because they are prepared to do the jobs on offer.
Back in the nineties when I saw that my job was at risk I had a list of perhaps forty jobs I could walk into withing days; the necessary parameters were "minimum £500 per week net before tax" and "investment (over and above any assets I already had) of £200 or less". In a number of cases I could be doing two at the same time. One December, short of the readies, my wife and I put that to the test - yes, it took many many hours but was not backbreaking and we were making over £1000 a week .

I'll stay out of the political argument for now but as regards Col B I left at the end of the winter term 1954 and remember Leach and Dickinson (as an unusual boy of 11 or so, reading Gibbon in the swirling beargarden of the dayroom). My swab in the last term, in which I had just become a monitor, was Ian Taylor. As to bullying, there are two perpetrators from my junior years who I still hope will burn in hell.

postwarblue wrote:. As to bullying, there are two perpetrators from my junior years who I still hope will burn in hell.

I also had two; one shared with a dangerous and sometimes deadly animal whilst the other fled to the other side of the world where he became a lecturer / professor; looking at the local fumaroles I was veeeeerrrrrrrrrry tempted!.

WOW. It's nice to see that others suffered as well as me, My worst year was my first in Prep B from January 1958. The Housemaster at that time wasn't interested. It was very much a case of 'Take it or leave !'

By the time I reached Coleridge B, I was certainly big enough to defend myself, thankfully.

Bullying still goes on in all schools today, both cyber, verbal and physical. yet it seems to me that the teachers of today are powerless to stop it.

postwarblue wrote:I'll stay out of the political argument for now but as regards Col B I left at the end of the winter term 1954 and remember Leach and Dickinson (as an unusual boy of 11 or so, reading Gibbon in the swirling beargarden of the dayroom). My swab in the last term, in which I had just become a monitor, was Ian Taylor. As to bullying, there are two perpetrators from my junior years who I still hope will burn in hell.

I can take up your story Robert because I joined Col B from one of the Prep houses in Winter term 1955. I think you have mentioned elsewhere AH Buck not being properly in control in your time. That was my impression too but in the early Summer of 1956 he was sacked, only for other reasons. Kirby took over for the interim and then NT Fryer. Fryer was a disciplinarian but in fairness to him the bullying thing then improved immensely. This may have had something to do with Seaman's regime too, which came about at this time.
So much seems to depend on the housemaster and the appointment of senior boys as monitors. As I said, I was aghast that this sort of stuff was still going on in the 1980s, as Tommy has detailed. Yes, I remember Ian Taylor well, with his mop of ginger hair. Presumably you will remember the late Nicholas Cox who attracted a warm obit some years ago in the Guardian for his work heading up the Public Record Office? National Audit Office? I can't remember which one. Nick was a classics scholar who was learning Russian as a hobby at school.

I remember Cox but what I seem to recollect is that he had a long spell away with TB.

I don't think Buck was not in control, I think he just didn't care for anything in the house not related to rugger or cricket or for boys who were less interested in those things. Perhaps his frame of reference was unreconstructed from his own time at CH (in Col A). At least two of the new boys who came in late in my time were incredibly unsuited to what they had been dropped into. One slept UNDER his bed his first night. Goodness knows what demons they had ticking away inside.

postwarblue wrote:I'll stay out of the political argument for now but as regards Col B I left at the end of the winter term 1954 and remember Leach and Dickinson (as an unusual boy of 11 or so, reading Gibbon in the swirling beargarden of the dayroom). My swab in the last term, in which I had just become a monitor, was Ian Taylor. As to bullying, there are two perpetrators from my junior years who I still hope will burn in hell.

I can take up your story Robert because I joined Col B from one of the Prep houses in Winter term 1955. I think you have mentioned elsewhere AH Buck not being properly in control in your time. That was my impression too but in the early Summer of 1956 he was sacked, only for other reasons. Kirby took over for the interim and then NT Fryer. Fryer was a disciplinarian but in fairness to him the bullying thing then improved immensely. This may have had something to do with Seaman's regime too, which came about at this time.
So much seems to depend on the housemaster and the appointment of senior boys as monitors. As I said, I was aghast that this sort of stuff was still going on in the 1980s, as Tommy has detailed. Yes, I remember Ian Taylor well, with his mop of ginger hair. Presumably you will remember the late Nicholas Cox who attracted a warm obit some years ago in the Guardian for his work heading up the Public Record Office? National Audit Office? I can't remember which one. Nick was a classics scholar who was learning Russian as a hobby at school.

Both Nick Cox and Ian Taylor are in the house photo I posted in the Coleridge Photo's section of this site.